The Quality-Quantity Battle will never stop. But in the transcription process, quality control is something you need to pay special attention to. No matter how costly the transcription appears to be, the consistency factor for the service levels or quantity will never be compromised. However, when you consign with a service provider, you must fully recognize that it is not just their duty to guarantee quality; you are equally liable for the finished result as well. If the quality of the audio recording is not sufficient, the service provider can't and should not promise to serve you with the error-free transcribed file. While in most audio files, background noise and interference are very normal, there may still be some noisy audios in which it is quite difficult to detect what is said. Therefore, if you want transcripts for such an audio file, make sure that you help the transcriber understand the audio's simple message.

By now you've already found that most transcription service providers claim 98 % or higher quality in transcripts. The level of 98 % is an industry-standard, so we felt it would be worth discussing how transcription service providers reliably perform on this pledge. Ensuring a systematic, accurate method is essential to maintaining effective, high-quality transcription. Performing QA transcript needs expertise, a consistent method, and a systematic plan to put together all the pieces. It begins by recruiting professional transcriptionists, retaining a solid QA staff, and then putting it together with strong customer support.

Highly skilled and well-trained transcriptionists with appropriate business expertise shape the starting point of an effective quality assurance process for transcription. Transcription service providers spend considerable time hiring professional transcriptionists and offering comprehensive initial and systematic preparation. Customers frequently ask about the software for automatic audio transcription or voice recognition and it is important to mention here. The technology is evolving and some suppliers of transcriptions are beginning to use the technology. Unfortunately, this method also needs human editors, which usually involves listening to the recording again to ensure accuracy.  For now, the best way to provide quality transcription is still human transcriptionists.

As mentioned above, quality is considered the most crucial transcription factor. Still, human nature suggests one cannot understand something's significance until he or she knows what will happen in the absence of the same. So if you understand clearly how a lack of accuracy can be a curse to your business, you will immediately come to realize its significance. The cost may be right, and the immediate availability may have led you to believe that, after all, you might be able to meet that deadline, but the harsh reality of poor quality work can set in very fast.

Many trustworthy suppliers operate a team of quality assurance professionals. The most popular method is to pick and analyze the sample size of completed transcripts which is statistically important. This is not appropriate to have two persons listening to each audio recording-first the transcriptionist, then the QA employee. This model ensures the QA team chooses the correct number of transcripts to find any transcriptionist that could deliver substandard transcripts. Accuracy is quite promising but much more challenging to achieve. The only way to check for consistency is to validate the transcriptions being performed with a consistent quality assurance model.

It’s a crucial factor that, not paying sufficient attention to the quality results in blank gaps and plenty of end-user mistakes. It means that some portions of the recording may not be transcribed at all. If you overlook accuracy, it may misrepresent the context. If you take software transcription aid over human transcription it can get much worse. The former is coded specifically for carrying out his mission. Thus it can't grasp the audio file's design and sound. Using this strategy, the QA team is then able to work on areas needing additional quality control easily and cost-effectively. The team will also closely supervise each transcriptionist in problem, who is then trained up until they reliably deliver accurate transcripts once again. This method is an essential statistical tool, allows providing inexpensive transcription services. To make two people listen to every audio file is neither cost-effective nor appropriate.

Customer service is a crucial part of transcript QA and is often overlooked. Transcription is still a human-based operation. Too important is the transcription of accuracy, but errors, although small ones still occur. This makes it a priority to provide an efficient customer support department, not a luxury. If a mistake happens in the QA protections of a product, a provider will provide the customers with a simple route to request corrections. It is where customer support is becoming very important. A significant final phase of the QA method is being able to correct errors easily.

Professional transcriptionist research with relevant industry expertise offers a very solid foundation on which to build a model for quality control. Potential misunderstandings and miscommunications in the content are resolved by demands for relevant reference information, and external testing work. When done, a specific set of consistency standards – typographical mistakes, blanks, phonetics (colloquialisms and vernacular phrases), and design errors – was reviewed for the job a second time. A professional Quality Analyst then checks the transcription file to mitigate the chance of familiarity blindness, where prolonged exposure in a text will render you blind to obvious mistakes. Adding this three-tier oversight to the workflow of a qualified professional who is not familiar with document ensures that the document is tripled for any phonetic, grammatical, and subject-specific issues and ensures that it can be error-free when delivered.

We just want to say at the very end that you choose your transcription service providers wisely, and always keep high-quality expectations. If you are trying to be very precise about the quality quotient you like, the service provider must make every effort to achieve that point, or else the company will simply give you a rough output.  Besides this, you can also remember that the source audio file is qualitative enough for proper transcription.